5fish
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YES!! American Meritocracy is failing us and breeding some of the equality within our society... The more we look at the 20th century the more we see the sins of our fathers and us... the elites are the new aristocrats of the Plutocrats'...
Here is the first article...
snip...
Meritocracy is the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, say, their parents’ social class, or their race, ethnicity, or gender. That idea is really hard to object to. And it’s not that we don’t have a good enough meritocracy, or that we have too little meritocracy, and that we’re failing to live up to the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments. But rather, it’s that we have too much of it. Once it gets established, that system ends up perpetuating inequality and being the central vehicle of class stratification. And even as it excludes most Americans from real opportunity, it also harms the few who seem to win. The basic idea is that meritocracy is the problem—it’s the disease, not the cure.
snip...
The first thing that’s happened is that elite education has just exploded and taken off. And the thing about education is that when one person’s education gets better, it reduces the value of everybody else’s education.
A second thing that’s happened to the middle class is in the labor market. We have changed the way in which we make things and provide services to favor exactly the elaborate educations that rich kids now get.
The inequality in education, the inequality in the labor market—these are structural forms of inequality and exclusion. They’re based on big systems that make it impossible for individual people to fight against them.
But because the idea of meritocracy is that anybody can get ahead, and that you get ahead based on your own accomplishments, meritocracy then tells middle class people who are being structurally excluded, “It’s your fault! You’re not good enough; you didn’t try hard enough; you don’t have the skills needed.” It blames the people who are excluded, and characterizes them as failures.
The next article...
snip...
Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.
snip... think of our kids...
Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining—the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century—and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor. Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.
The next article...
snip...
In an engrossing passage from Twilight of the Elites, a new book about the American meritocracy and its failures, author Chris Hayes directs our attention to an all but forgotten moment in 2009, when debate raged about who President Obama should appoint to a Supreme Court vacancy. Sonia Sotomayor was widely thought to be on his short list. But various liberal commentators, including The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen and Harvard's Laurence Tribe, argued that she should be passed over for alternative candidates who they regarded as observably smarter. "Keep in mind the person under discussion is someone who, from humble beginnings in the Bronx, had gained entry to Princeton, graduated summa cum laude, and gone on to Yale Law, where she edited the Yale Law Journal," Hayes observed. "She had checked off every box on the to-do list of meritocratic achievement. Apparently it wasn't enough."
snip...
Hayes' theories are many:
Here is the first article...
Why Meritocracy Is Bad for America | Next Big Idea Club
Yale law professor Daniel Markovits explains how meritocracy has become a rat race that no one wins.
nextbigideaclub.com
snip...
Meritocracy is the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, say, their parents’ social class, or their race, ethnicity, or gender. That idea is really hard to object to. And it’s not that we don’t have a good enough meritocracy, or that we have too little meritocracy, and that we’re failing to live up to the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments. But rather, it’s that we have too much of it. Once it gets established, that system ends up perpetuating inequality and being the central vehicle of class stratification. And even as it excludes most Americans from real opportunity, it also harms the few who seem to win. The basic idea is that meritocracy is the problem—it’s the disease, not the cure.
snip...
The first thing that’s happened is that elite education has just exploded and taken off. And the thing about education is that when one person’s education gets better, it reduces the value of everybody else’s education.
A second thing that’s happened to the middle class is in the labor market. We have changed the way in which we make things and provide services to favor exactly the elaborate educations that rich kids now get.
The inequality in education, the inequality in the labor market—these are structural forms of inequality and exclusion. They’re based on big systems that make it impossible for individual people to fight against them.
But because the idea of meritocracy is that anybody can get ahead, and that you get ahead based on your own accomplishments, meritocracy then tells middle class people who are being structurally excluded, “It’s your fault! You’re not good enough; you didn’t try hard enough; you don’t have the skills needed.” It blames the people who are excluded, and characterizes them as failures.
The next article...
How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition
Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out.
www.theatlantic.com
snip...
Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.
snip... think of our kids...
Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining—the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century—and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor. Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.
The next article...
The Cult of Smartness: How Meritocracy Is Failing America
A provocative new book by blames the failure of elites for our woes. But solving the problems is harder than diagnosing them.
www.theatlantic.com
snip...
In an engrossing passage from Twilight of the Elites, a new book about the American meritocracy and its failures, author Chris Hayes directs our attention to an all but forgotten moment in 2009, when debate raged about who President Obama should appoint to a Supreme Court vacancy. Sonia Sotomayor was widely thought to be on his short list. But various liberal commentators, including The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen and Harvard's Laurence Tribe, argued that she should be passed over for alternative candidates who they regarded as observably smarter. "Keep in mind the person under discussion is someone who, from humble beginnings in the Bronx, had gained entry to Princeton, graduated summa cum laude, and gone on to Yale Law, where she edited the Yale Law Journal," Hayes observed. "She had checked off every box on the to-do list of meritocratic achievement. Apparently it wasn't enough."
snip...
Hayes' theories are many:
- Institutions designed to reward merit are being gamed by the privileged, who create a self-perpetuating elite. The most familiar example concerns admission to prestigious schools. Admissions tests like the SAT began as a high-minded reform. Applicants would be chosen for intellectual prowess and compete for their spot on a level playing field. Thanks to test prep, the rich get lots of time to practice on it, while even smart poor kids don't.
- More broadly, inequality begets more inequality. "Those who climb up the ladder will always find a way to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up." Thus the astonishingly outsized gains seen at the very top of American society.
- The intense competition inherent in meritocracy creates powerful incentives to cheat, and encourages the attitude that whatever you do in pursuit of dominance is fine as long as you profit or win. For example, at Enron traders who broke the law weren't punished if they were making money. And in Major League Baseball, everyone pretended that steroids weren't around.
- When elites break the rules they aren't punished like regular people. They're bailed out of trouble, or spared criminal prosecution for their lawlessness. This is actually the subject of Glenn Greenwald's latest book.
- There is too much social distance separating the people in charge with the folks subject to their decisions. Thus Catholic bishops who sympathized more with molesting priests than their victims, Senators who send men from a class they rarely encounter to fight the wars they approve, and the disaster planners who couldn't conceive of how the timing of Hurricane Katrina at the end of the month would affect the ability of poor residents to evacuate. There is a long history of Americans complaining about the gulf separating them from their leaders, from the 'distant, unresponsive' King George to the 'out-of-touch, inside-the-Beltway' politicians of today.